Dr. Feelgood (13 page)

“He savaged me,” Kennedy told Reston about Khrushchev. “It was the worst day of my life.”

Kennedy went on to tell Reston that Khrushchev had “beaten the hell” out of him. What, of course, Kennedy did not reveal was that he had taken at least three injections of methamphetamine that day. And what Kennedy did not know was that because the KGB had raided Dr. Jacobson’s office, it could be presumed that Khrushchev knew all about JFK’s relationship with Jacobson and his reliance on the injections. What neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev knew was that the CIA was already aware of the raid from Mark Shaw, the Kennedy family photographer, who was also former OSS and a CIA nonofficial cover officer. Shaw’s identity as a CIA officer was confirmed by his children and by a former CIA nonofficial cover officer, who, for obvious reasons, will remain nameless.

Just how much difficulty the Kennedy Khrushchev meeting would create for the president soon became apparent within two months after the Vienna Summit, when the East Germans began construction on the Berlin Wall, thereby isolating the East German sector and creating a new set of tensions. And the following year, the Soviets would place ballistic missiles in Cuba, just ninety miles off the coast of Florida, posing not just a formidable challenge to the president but also demonstrating what happens when a president cannot hold his own in a room with Soviet adversaries. The CIA took special notice of how close the United States had come to a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, something Kennedy’s predecessor had so carefully and competently avoided.

In London, Kennedy was scheduled for meetings with British Prime Minister Harold McMillan to report on his summit with Khrushchev. It was crucial that the British understood the severity not only of Khrushchev’s tone, but also his demands that implied that the Soviets would go to war over Germany. There were heavy war clouds gathering over Europe, perhaps precipitated by Kennedy’s reluctance to send in American troops to support the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. However, lurking in the background, unbeknownst to Max Jacobson, was Khrushchev’s knowledge that the Soviets had what amounted to nothing less than an inside man, Jacobson himself, visiting the White House, who was doping the president of the United States. How much could that play into the Soviet strategy over the course of the ensuing year, and was Khrushchev already testing the resolve of the new president?

On JFK’s arrival, the British crowds cheered the American president and his entourage, lining the streets along the way from Heathrow to central London, waving American flags just like the Viennese had. There were a few anti-nuke protestors holding posters, but their demands for a complete nuclear disarmament were drowned out by crowds welcoming the Kennedys.

Jacobson was looking forward to seeing his wife, who had proceeded to London ahead of him and was staying at Claridges near Hyde Park. Just as Max settled into their room at the Claridges, he received a summons to Number Four, Buckingham Palace, the home of JFK’s brother-in-law, Prince Stanislaw Radziwill, for what he thought would be a simple meet and greet. It wasn’t. Jacobson made sure to bring along his attaché case.

The car Kennedy sent took Jacobson to the back entrance of Buckingham Palace, where the driver escorted him through a garden to a door, which led through the employees’ bathroom to a very steep staircase into a large foyer. From there, Max’s driver led him up another staircase to the second floor where the bedrooms were located. He was ushered into Lee Radziwill’s bedroom (Lee was Jackie’s sister) where Jackie, the president, and Lee were simply chatting. President Kennedy motioned for Jacobson to follow him to an anteroom to administer another injection. Then he administered an injection to Jackie Kennedy, whom he had treated previously for migraines and depression in Washington and at the Kennedys’s West Palm Beach. Having performed his duties, Jacobson retraced his steps out of the palace, where he was confronted by a tall, handsome, and elegantly dressed man who emerged from the shadows. He smiled at the elderly doctor, extended his hands, and said, “I am Lee’s husband, Prince Radziwill. You can call me ‘Stash.’” Prince Radziwill belonged to the Polish royal family. He and Jacobson were both Polish émigrés and both traveled in high circles. It would not be long before Stash Radziwill himself would become one of Max’s patients as well as one of his friends.

The following day, the Jacobsons prepared for their flight home. Once on board, Jacobson immediately fell asleep, only to be awakened by a sharp poke in the ribs from Nina. When he opened his eyes, he saw President Kennedy in his nightshirt standing at the entrance of his private quarters.

“I need to talk to you, Max,” the president said. “Could you come into my quarters?”

The summit was a strain, Kennedy said. And with all of the social activities, and the follow-up meetings, he knew that he was exhausted.

“My old back injury has been giving me discomfort,” the president explained. “I want to thank you personally for helping me stay in control of it. I’m grateful.” He said that the pain had never gotten in the way of his public appearances or meetings with heads of state. And with that, Max administered another injection to the president, was pleased that Kennedy said he felt very relaxed, left him in his quarters for his usual forty-five minute nap, and returned to the main cabin to find a discomfited Nina waiting for him.

Nina explained that while Jacobson was in the president’s quarters, Eunice Shriver, the president’s sister, had popped into the seat next to Nina and wanted to know what they were doing there on Air Force One.

“Ask my husband directly when he returns,” Nina answered. But Eunice Shriver never followed up.

When the Jacobsons arrived in New York, they returned to their normal lives. It was too early to tell what the fallout from JFK’s summit with Khrushchev might entail, but the young president’s addiction to methamphetamines clearly gave the Soviet premier the advantage. Across an ocean and a continent, Khrushchev, believing that he held the key to controlling the president of the United States, made his plans for the Berlin Wall and for assembling the missiles he would place aboard ships for transport to Cuba. Kennedy’s worst fears were about to come true, and they were coming true before the eyes of those deep inside the CIA, who already mistrusted him.

Mickey Charles Mantle remains one of the great American baseball legends of the twentieth century alongside Joe DiMaggio and Babe Ruth. He was a switch hitter who had great power with either hand and great overall athleticism that carried him from game to game in a long season. He also had charisma and swagger, key qualities not just for the Yankees but for a New York media market that fed on heroes. But like most heroes who are only human, the Mick had feet of clay. He drank excessively, socialized too much, and was a womanizer, a far cry from the wholesome, all-American boy he was portrayed as in the eyes of the public and adoring Yankee fans.

Well before he finally sought treatment for alcoholism at the Betty Ford Clinic in 1994, Mantle admitted his hard living had hurt both his playing and his family. His rationale was that the men in his family had all died young, so he expected to die young as well. His father had died of Hodgkin’s disease at age forty in 1952, and his grandfather had also died young of the same disease. “I’m not gonna be cheated,” he said on more than one occasion.

Mickey was not a choir boy in any way. He had cirrhosis of the liver from his alcoholism, he was called a “whore-monger” by sportscaster and Max Jacobson patient Howard Cosell, and even other ball players described Mantle’s philandering while on the road. Others have called Mantle’s lifestyle reckless and at times self-destructive. What would preclude him from extending his career with performance-enhancing drugs administered by Max Jacobson, especially if they were supposed to be a well-kept secret?

By 1961, when Mantle first met Dr. Jacobson, he was already a great New York Yankee legend. At almost thirty years old and at his peak, he had replaced the great Joe DiMaggio in the hearts and minds of Yankees fans. As a rookie, he had suffered from what was most likely a torn ACL, for which there was no treatment at the time, and he was still performing well mid-career. However, in 1961, during his homerun race with fellow Yankee Roger Maris, Mantle received a special injection from Dr. Jacobson, the first of many injections that ultimately led to his losing the homerun battle with his teammate.

According to Jacobson’s friend Mike Samek, “Max prepared a special mixture for Mantle that included steroids, placenta, bone, calcium, and a very small amount of methamphetamine. I was there countless times when Mantle visited the office or received packages [of the mixture and syringes to self-inject]. Max spent a lot of time lecturing him not to drink. Max was very anti-alcohol and had a low tolerance for drinking. Max created his own version of steroids that was different from cortisone. I worked in the lab with him as he prepared the mixture.”
²⁸

Samek’s memory of Mantle as a longtime patient was confirmed by singer Eddie Fisher. “I saw Max treat Mantle many times in his office,” he said. “I even saw Max give him a shot of cortisone at the airport when he complained to Max about his knee. . . . He was a patient, just as I was, who believed Max brought miracles. Dr. Needles. He was Miracle Max. He probably extended his [professional baseball] career. I’m not sure he got the meth like I did. He may have only got the cortisone. But who knows?”
²⁹

Actress Alice Ghostley’s husband, actor Felice Orlandi, worked full time in Max’s office for about eight years, during which Mantle was a frequent patient. “He was there quite a bit,” Ghostley recalled, “as I remembered Felice always getting Yankee tickets from him.” She believed that Felice delivered “packages” from Jacobson to Mantle. She did not know the content of the packages, but she could speculate about their contents. (April, 2006).

Jane Leavy, the author of the wonderfully researched book on Mantle,
The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood
, wrote in painstaking detail about a flawed Mantle. In her book, she reveals that on September 24, 1961, it was sportscaster Mel Allen, “the voice of the Yankees,” who introduced Mantle to Jacobson. Mantle was in the final stretch of a legendary home run contest with Roger Maris to top Babe Ruth’s 1927 home run record of sixty. Mantle had hit his fifty-fourth home run, but was feeling under the weather as his energy began to sputter. Maybe it was a virus, maybe a simple cold or an upper respiratory infection, that was hurting his game. When Mantle told Mel Allen how he was feeling, Allen said that he had a doctor who would give him a shot that would fix Mantle right up. Mantle agreed, and Allen made an appointment for Mantle to see Jacobson the following day.

Like President Kennedy, Leavy writes, “Mantle had a secret that required discreet medical intervention.” Leavy says that according to what Mantle told his wife, “Dr. Max told Mantle to pull his pants down and filled the syringe with what Mantle later described as a smoky liquid. He squirted some into the air and plunged the needle deep into Mantle’s hip. Too high, Mantle said later. It hit bone,” he said.
³⁰
This shot, possibly from a dirty needle, caused Mickey pain and a massive infection that resulted in hospitalization. He also missed the last few games of the season, which prevented him from breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record, which Maris broke with sixty-one.

According to Leavy, Mantle “left the doctor’s office in excruciating pain. The needle felt like a red-hot poker,” she wrote. Jacobson advised him to play hurt. Walk it off. “Don’t take a cab. You’ll be fine.” Leavy writes that Mantle’s wife said that he “drug his leg all the way back to the hotel,” and when she asked him what happened, he said, “I just got sucked dry by a vampire.” She also told Leavy that “Mick told me, ‘I think the guy wanted to hurt me.’ And said his place was filthy and he had blood on his coat.” Leavy also wrote that “Mantle said he never knew what was in Jacobson’s syringe, and he never paid the bill, either.”
³¹

There are a few holes in Mantle’s story as related by his wife to Leavy. First, with the thousands of injections that Jacobson had administered over his career, it is unlikely that he would have struck Mantle’s hip bone. Second, Mantle was the toast of the town and Jacobson always treated such celebrities with great deference and care. It’s unlikely that he would have been so cavalier to tell Mantle to “walk it off ” when his objective was to make his patients feel better.

Another person who has described the relationship between Max Jacobson and Mickey Mantle is Curt Smith, one of baseball’s leading historians and author of
The Voice: Mel Allen’s Untold Story
. Smith’s book corroborates Jane Leavy’s account. He writes that Allen was not just a casual Jacobson patient, but a long-term patient who remained under Jacobson’s care even after he was reportedly fired from the Yankees because of Mantle’s reaction to Jacobson’s shot. Allen continued to receive treatments even as he slipped further and further into a state of clinical depression. Curt Smith said that everyone thought that Mel Allen was simply an alcoholic, but he wasn’t. Smith believed that it was the shots he was receiving that altered the announcer’s behavior to the point where there were periods of dead air when Allen was announcing, word slurs, and simple mistakes about facts that a sportscaster shouldn’t make. But Mel Allen never left Jacobson’s care. In fact, Allen reportedly told Smith that Jacobson’s shots “really worked.”
³²

The late Ralph Houk, the former Yankee manager who took over the team in 1960, blamed Mel Allen directly for Mantle’s turn to Jacobson in 1961. Once addicted, though, Mantle became a regular patient, and although he would never approach overturning Babe Ruth’s record again, his career in baseball continued. He kept on playing, even through the pains in his legs and his torn ACL, until the end of the 1968 baseball season. He retired in March 1969.

Mickey Mantle was a sophisticated sports celebrity as he got older and more comfortable with his fame. He was not adverse to taking stimulants, as Jim Bouton’s classic book
Ball Four
³³
later revealed. Greenies (stimulants, also called “uppers”) were prevalent in the clubhouse.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
sports columnist Terry Pluto wrote that, “I do know that in 1961, Kubek and the others thought Mantle was getting a cortisone shot—Ray Miller told me that he took cort shots 15–20 times one season in AAA . . . As for what Mantle took, no idea. I do know about the Yankees in 1961 . . . I wrote about it in a book with Tony Kubek.
³⁴
Back then, players drank a lot and did a lot of greenies. That’s all I know.”
³⁵
If what Terry Pluto says is true, Mantle would certainly have been aware of performance-enhancing drugs.